skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There’s no law whatsoever that says a brokerage has to trade all stocks.
There sure are a lot "may"s and "could"s in this article.
The positions getting closed was a consequence of preventing people to buy id argue. They could have closed them anyway but probably at a higher price
Populism! Its popping up in every corner of American life
I'm just not sure about that until I see the volume and see that as a reason for them to not let me buy a security. They can have their systems go down... I mean obviously that's not ideal but that's something that could happen due to volume - but Robinhood didn't go down. Vanguard didn't go down. I can still buy via Vanguard right this second - what does the volume have to do with it?
I believe the original r/WSB idea was to induce a short squeeze and cause Melvin Capital to lose their shirts.

See: http://www.isthesqueezesquoze.com/
Boy Learns Hacking Tips from YouTube, Demands Rs 10 Crore Ransom from Father
Still too high
It turns out that Robinhood accounts are margin by default, which is not really standard practice. I couldn't prove that this behavior (closing held positions without consent) was intended with that design, but it does feel pretty gnarly.
Please don't post unsubstantive comments here. We're trying for something a bit different than internet default.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
Please also don't post unsubstantive comments here. We're trying for something a bit different than internet default.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
> RobinHood refused “buy” order that were completely inline with the margin requirements, and that caused the share price to dive.

This is just a conspiracy theory. It doesn't even make sense. If GME was objectively such a good bet, you really think that those institutional investors out there were simply ignoring it? That Robinhood's users alone were the sole reason for the speculative spike in this stock?

This is a SCAM. Robinhood users were the VICTIMS. And I won't speak to their motives, and am no real fan, but the truth is Robinhood saved you people a ton of money by refusing those trades.
This is the "buy high sell never" part of the meme.

Imagine there are only two shares GME.

You buy two GME for $1ea. Two short sellers needs 1 GME each lest they hemorrhage money on fees. You loudly announce your plan to hold half your GME forever. The short sellers trip over each other to pay you stupid money for the one GME you are selling. You then sit on the other GME for awhile, maybe sell it in a year or two for a buck. In any case despite buying two and selling one you've made a ton of profit.

Now scale this up to several million people.
I guess the closed ones might've been only the positions on margin, which might be legal to close at their discretion?
No, "45" was a reference to the last president.

>the losing side voting against it as a protest is common in every election.

Really? That would be news to me. Do you have a source for that?
"The only winning move is not to play."

But what will that really mean in practice?

What if someone fakes an attack coming from say Estonia, and then the US' autonomous weapons annihilate Estonia?
I really like this browser. The reason I don't use it is kind of silly: Scrolling with j/k works so much more nicely with vimium in firefox. It's such a small complaint, but it really is what is keeping me away.
I expect that a broker won't arbitrarily make certain stocks "sell only" and cancel buy orders that have already been submitted.
Serious Sudo Trouble for Linux Distros
Yes you are so totally right because a huge company scrapped a b2c legacy acquired photo product you liked whilst merging it with another service, they are going to shut down their multi-billion dollar b2b cloud offering in a strategic growth market at any moment without warning. Thank you for pointing this out! And can I say how much I enjoy seeing this same comment repeated on every google cloud post.
It's traded it's entire float many times over in the past week: https://www.marketwatch.com/story/gamestops-stock-surge-is-m...
In zsh, it resumes the entire loop.
I take it then that you think this is nonsense:

https://twitter.com/justinkan/status/1354853920762253315

?
They're allowing the stock to sell, they only disabled purchases. This will clearly make the stock go back down, benefiting Robinhood's investors over their users.
Luddites is also a good example. Oh, you are poor and starving and protesting on the streets? They start destroying machines? Time to arrest everyone, even those who did nothing.
It’s really kind of ironic. People are knee-jerk blaming RH for closing margin positions because they didn’t fully understand how they work and the risks involved. Simultaneously, the same people are blaming RH for stepping in the way of what very certainly would have turned into a bad trade for a lot of people.

I don’t take RH’s side but it’s hard to see a winning play for them, it’s damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-don’t.
As I understand it, Robinhood has VC investors and uses third parties to execute trades (that pay Robinhood for it) which stand to lose on GME. The talk being that they pressured Robinhood into this action so they wouldn't lose as much money.
There was an actual shortage, though, because people's needs changed. Nobody wanted to go to the grocery twice a week when most of the variables of the pandemic were unknowns. Nobody needed commercial toilet paper, but everyone started needing residential toilet paper. Some supply chains for staples were disrupted. (Meatpackers in NYC all getting COVID...)

Many supply chains are still disrupted, relative to changes in demand, just try buying a GPU right now.
This is interesting in that it provokes the question of what an app's rating "means". Clearly, if you were getting the app because you expected to be able to trade GME and you can't, then this is a good signal not to get the app. But not all "protest votes" of this sort may be equally good signals.
couple hours after sister company of their major stakeholder (as of monday) disables purchases of the same stock for retail.

this stinks.
> we know with certainty price will crash

I agree, and yet I seriously doubt even 5% of people saying this have opened a short position, e.g. bought puts.
You can't really say antitrust hasn't been working when no one has been using it. The laws are fine if we have the will to apply them.
Head of Engineering Job at Mira – Disrupting Health Insurance
"A recent IBM survey found that 61% of workers want to continue working from home permanently even after the COVID-19 pandemic is over."
https://mytechdecisions.com/facility/ibm-61-want-permanent-r...

Some other surveys show a considerable percentage of business owners, executives and managers at companies think the same.

I can attest to the growth. I run a job board called Remote OK and you can see the explosive rise in job posts and revenue here from around May 2020: https://remoteok.io/open
This is exactly why people should be outraged. The type of risk that requires a margin call isn't present by just holding long positions in a security. Unless you are trading options or selling short, your equity is equal to your positions, and no margin call should be necessary.

They are literally using the margin call mechanic to force closures in positions that have no risk.
Virtually every large multistrat fund is short GME now. This doesn’t really mean anything.
That's the rumor but there's no evidence to back it up. Melvin could've closed their GME positions days ago, in which case Citadel wouldn't be on the hook for any further price changes.
Can someone, who has expertise in this field, explain what the hell happened? How on earth is it possible that all brokers at the same time disallowed to buy certain stocks? Who is responsible for this? The SEC, the FED, the White House, or..? Who gave the call? Who has that much power?
I wasn't aware of that aspect and that does change things. It still can be pretty shady though depending on the total borrowed on margin versus the total value of the stock owned. If someone borrowed $1000 on margin and bought stock that is now worth $2000, I'm not sure why Robinhood would have justification to sell off everything.
Chineese are smart they know goverments in the world will buy it and will buy on this. At that time China took lives and freedom with that virus world wide and now will touch everyones in anal.
Because people start to feel chill a bit world wide and its time to put all on feelings that they ill. Best option is to put fonger etc in the ass. After that you a well or you are ill. Depends on what is your own psichology about your ass. About keeping your ass safe from WuhanClan
If Amazon did this, then it would solve the problem of grandfathered reviews from years ago being used to promote completely different inferior products. It would have saved me hundreds of dollars worth of returns.

But Amazon has no incentive to do so, because they would sell less items. Maybe with Steam the target market of gamers can direct so much more backlash towards something that doesn't work than the general audience of Amazon.
From what I understand Melvin Capital, one of the biggest short-sellers that got in trouble, is owned by Citadel, which is also Robinhood's largest customer (buying user data, of all things) and maybe partial owner. I'm no lawyer, but to me it sounds like that might be a conflict of interests.

By preventing people from buying shares, the short-sellers have less competition to buy the available shares, and will have an easier time getting them, while paying less for them. Robinhood seems to be manipulating the market to make it easier for Melvin Capital to cut their substantial losses.
> Third, if I want to earn a living or build a company around open source, what are my options?

Don't. The very idea that you should have to "earn a living" is now bogus and should be thrown out.

I believe computers, software and technology in general should be used to bring about a post-historical Golden Age of peace and prosperity.[1] Programs especially are a kind of wealth that can be copied for effectively zero cost.

So I would say that the urge to "earn a living or build a company around open source" is misguided. If you want to write software and give it away for free, that's awesome! My advice is either be comfortable being really poor, or be wealthy already. If you want to go from being poor to being wealthy by giving away copies of software, I don't know what to tell you, to me that seems like an oxymoron. It just seems like a weird idea.

Instead, let's use the technology we already have to construct a new economy that provides a good quality of life for everyone automatically.

[1] Otherwise, what's the goddamned point!?
You know the adage usually applied to Facebook, "If you're not paying for anything, you aren't the customer, you're the product" ? . Daytraders and WSBers and other small fish like you and me aren't Robinhood's customers. Robinhood's customers are Citadel and companies like them who pay Robinhood for order flow from the uninformed masses. Keeping that in mind, here is the simple answer to your question:

https://twitter.com/justinkan/status/1354853920762253315?s=2...
I had already transferred all my stocks from Robinhood to my company provided Fidelity account sometime back after reading about their shady practices last year:

https://www.sec.gov/news/press-release/2020-321
> Go move to another country that isn't America so you don't have to listen to people you disagree with.

Wew lad.

Also do you actually know what a neoliberal is?
Short sales do not work like that. You can have a short position indefinitely, as long as you pay the margin interest and meet the margin maintenance requirements. Options positions are another story, in-the-money calls do require delivery of the shares by the expiration date, and next such date is tomorrow.

Nobody is going to make the hedge funds burn. At this point the hedge funds are fleecing whoever was buying shares or options yesterday (who do you think they bought them from?).
What is your hope for reforming the ability of a single person to keep repeating a lie and nearly causing an insurrection?
Social Media Automation Tool
I am building a tool which can send post to various platform at once.

Do you want to try it out, please DM me on twitter.com/sarthaksavvy
My understanding is the long term plan is to try and bankrupt some hedge funds or drive the SEC/regulatory bodies to enforce rules against the elite class of investors; its not entirely about profit for everyone.

There's so much discussion on HackerNews today about people who are going to lose out on these stocks where I've seen a healthy amount of comments on Reddit in the last week of people buying stock merely "for the lulz". I think there's a non-insignificant amount of "investors" who have tossed paltry sums at $GME with no plans on making a return.

Honestly, I'd have done the same, but I don't do any form of stock trading so I don't have accounts on any platforms to do it. I've done the same with various crypto shitcoins and made a few bucks off throwing $50 or $100 at something I don't expect to ever see return on too.
Citadel is blocking trades on these stocks where Melvin Capital holds shorts for any platform that uses them; Robinhood is just the most prominant among small retail traders.

Citadel "bailed out Melvin Capital" because Citadel essentially owns Melvin and so their loss is our loss sort of situation. Melvin Capital stated they had closed out their short position on GameStop, but those are huge losses to cover no one knows how true that is. There is a lot of rumor that Citadel/Melvin Capital re-bought short positions yesterday before Citadel restricted trades to manipulate the market. If this is true it is highly illegal, but this effectively allow Citadel/Melvin to make back their losses if they can force market prices down.

TL/DR, Citadel/Melvin are breaking the law, all the retail traders are getting fucked, but when this is done Citadel/Melvin ends up having more cash than ever.
Excellent point. This vote-mob isn't due to some extraneous BS like some other ones, it's a response to an unexpected and customer-hostile service restriction.

I don't see how anyone could trust Robinhood with their money in the future.
It'd certainly be alienating not to have a desk if you were in the office every day.

But if you're doing two days a week in the office, all your meetings will move into those days so they can happen in person, so you'll miss having your own desk less.
> Americans have thick skin. It's in our culture.

This really doesn't track historically. Lots of voices have been historically silenced by American majorities because of hurt feelings or "decency."

It's also worth noting that America hasn't been uniformly ahead of the curve in terms of granting rights to those that were originally denied. Probably the worst example is getting rid of slavery, which was far more bloody than in many other places. In some other areas we've been ahead of the curve, in some behind. But note that some of that also came from the courts in controversial ways. The first amendment has not correlated to a better track record at granting groups their rights.
They could have blamed the SEC, and the users would have hated the SEC instead of them.
Investors and key shareholders sacrificed Robinhood and are willing to eat lawsuits because hedge funds' GME positions tower over all of that.
Some people are complaining to me that this comment is an implicit call to violence. It's not so hard to see why they might be reading it that way.

Please don't post like that to HN. Instead, either post comments that are unambiguously within the site guidelines to begin with, or be careful to disambiguate your intent. Otherwise we end up in flamewar hell or something even worse than flamewar hell.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
People have been getting angrier since 2008. Lots of those that were young and suffered through are adults now, the ones that were adults are getting older and everyone is still pissed off about what happened.

I definitely feel I'm getting squeezed, even though I've increased my salary quite a lot since 2005, including moving continents to pretty good jobs in Europe. I can feel the squeeze in society, with friends that even in a rich nation with a good salary still don't look very brightly into the future. Climate disasters incoming, also propelled up by the elites (or at least delaying action against, inaction is an attack in this case).

People were tired, now a lot are tired, bored, unemployed and angry.
Tastyworks also blocked opening new positions.
Please also note that people from many countries participate here. I suspect they may also listen to people they disagree with.
If this listing happens, BTC will go above 150k in 2021.

Too many people with money and time on their hands.
I actually agree with your premise, but I don't want to listen to you when you use self contradictory phrases like 'neoliberal fascists'. I imagine I'm not alone. You're getting downvoted because you sound incoherent and unhinged.
From what I understand, Citadel, the mother company of Melvin Capital, one of the largest short-sellers that got in trouble, is responsible for 60% of Robinhood's revenue, buying user data from them.

Robinhood might be protecting their largest customer.

Edit: it's possible Citadel pays Robinhood for something else instead. And it's possible they don't fully own but only invested in Melvin. Still, there do seem to be pretty clear ties.
> e-mail can exist in any hostile environment it wants, unlike Signal which has a user which is more careful

Could you explain why Signal users are more careful than email users? Aren't all Signal users also email users?

I suppose the reverse isn't true, and there are machines that send people transactional emails (e.g. receipts for online purchases) which it would be nice to secure with PGP.

The real problem with securing email, from my perspective, is the difficulty of creating a UX which accurately and intuitively conveys to the user whether the message they are sending is secure (and what "secure" means). By using a separate app which never sends plaintext, that's basically a non-problem.
Depends on how far back you want to go. The term "object oriented programming" was coined back in the 60s. Languages like Smalltalk were introduced in the 70s.
Correct. They blocked buys which would drive the price down, benefitting Citadel, their main source of revenue. I don’t know if that’s why they did this but that’s what the lawsuit is for: to find out. At worst, Robinhood is going to close because of this and their and Citadel’s execs might face prison for manipulating the market.
> I don't think "While mocking people with disabilities and homophobia is frequent, I have yet to see any racism or xenophobia" is the defense you think it is.

I think that it's a bit of a stretch to say that the language they use means they're mocking people with disabilities or homophobia. Using words ironically just to be edgy is completely different from believing others to be inferior or an invasive entity to be defended against. That's very apparent when you talk to, say, an angsty teenager versus an actual ethnonationalist or even just your garden variety civic nationalist.

They might use the same words, but mean them in completely different ways, and actually be expressing very different things. I think that as it pertains to the internet, certain dialects of edgy, slang filled english are as close to a global lingua franca as can be considered possible. You can't paint all of these people with the same brush. Aside from speaking the same dialect of english, they use it to express very different thoughts, no less diverse or varied as those who speak other ones. This nuance will get missed if you overliteralize what they say and take it at face value.
This is not true at all. Source: am Facebooker.

Leadership allowed people to trade in their iOS devices early for an Android phone, about 1.5 years ago. This was because most people had iOS at FB. Anecdotally, I don't think a lot of employees did this.
Robinhood is automatically initiating GME sell orders on users' behalf
I believe half of Robinhood customers own GME, so it isn't at all unreasonable for all of those reviews to be disgruntled users.
No, God in Christianity is not a dictator and this misunderstands both the religion and the concept of dictatorship. Even if God were such a figure, he freely allows his subjects to choose the (ultimately unsatisfactory) life away from him. Ask the Uighurs if they have such an option.

Sometimes the sheer ignorance on display here is appalling. Honestly.
> It's unrealistic to imply that people shouldn't share opinions of behavior if they weren't directly and personally affected by that behavior.

The thing about opinions nowadays is that they are manipulated right and left. It has become absolutely trivial to whip up a mob into a frenzy.

This isn't to say that any concerted movement against something one was not personally affected by is illegitimate. Clearly, one does not need to be a person of color to support BLM.

My question regarding the mobbing prevention was in the spirit of the first form.
Agreed, data channels for uncompressed audio is certainly the most interesting idea of this project for me, but it appears they are having trouble with the audio worklet processing time, so it's not an immediate slam dunk :-/
While I agree with your main point re name calling, it's absolutely not true that you get fewer downvotes if you follow HN's written rules. There are also unwritten groupthink (for lack of a better phrase) rules for which you _will_ get downvoted for. I don't have many controversial opinions but sometimes they are outside the generally accepted "truths".
The thing is, all brokers are doing the same. How on earth is this possible?
1. Robinhood accounts are all margin by default. Most novice investors don't know the difference. They should, but I would wager Robinhood doesn't spend a lot of time educating people about this.

2. Long positions (buying and holding stock) aren't leveraged. There is no capital risk to holding a stock. If the sales of GME are entirely based on other positions being underwater, then sure, but it seems at least some of the examples provided aren't in that situation.
I've seen the essence of this opinion posted by others without downvoting.

Have you considered the votes are less to do with the opinion than your choices in communicating it?
Servers: Cool Once Again
>People are knee-jerk blaming RH for closing margin positions because they didn’t fully understand how they work

People are typically given a choice to sell other assets, deposit more or close in these situations rather than getting their stock sold at the brief lowest possible price driven by the very broker closing the position. Also, typically it's only a portion that gets liquidated rather than everything on margin.
The Geneva Conventions don't ban grapeshot (or canister). But even though it's legal to use, the military is focusing on other more effective technologies for short range air defense.
Youtube routinely scrubs views, likes, and dislikes from videos based on attempts to discern if they're fraudulent. You can't believe that this is evidence that Youtube is conspiring to support Biden unless you also believe that Youtube is conspiring to suppress BTS, the famous K-Pop boy band: https://www.quora.com/Why-did-YouTube-delete-views-from-BTS-...